Russian Bots Wasted No Time Trying to Confuse People After the Mueller Indictment and the Parkland S
After special counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 people associated with the Russian troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency with conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election, it didn’t take long for known Russian Twitter bots to try to muddy the news cycle’s waters—just as they helped do as part of the very propaganda campaign Mueller describes in his indictment.
By early Saturday morning, seven of the top 10 trending topics of a collection of 600 Twitter accounts that are known to be linked to Russia—including openly pro-Russian users, accounts that take part in Russian disinformation campaigns, and automated bot accounts that parrot Kremlin messaging—were about Mueller’s indictment. Those topics included “Indictment,” “Rosenstein,” “Rod,” “Rod Rosenstein,” “allegation,” “13,” and “meddling,” according to a dashboard maintained by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund, that monitors these accounts. “Mueller” was the top hashtag on Saturday, and by Tuesday morning, the top trending hashtag had evolved to “trumpcolluded.”
http://amp.slate.com/technology/2018/02/russian-bots-were-active-after-the-florida-shooting-and-the-latest-mueller-indictment.html?